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A friend recently hit me with some good advice via IM: “Hang in there Manfred.” (Thats a reference to Accelerando for those not in the know)

The way William Gibson describes the future seems to fit better every year. “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” Most of the technologies that appeared in 07 were measurably cool: the iPhone, the end of analog TV, GPS in cars & phone / blue tooth proliferation, Moore’s law and multi-core CPU’s, etc., etc. These are things that a number of years ago I looked forward to the way I now look forward to neural nanonics, private space flight, bioengineering, and other amazing stuff. Now they appear rather blah, about as exiting as a car or television set. The future is already here alright. I guess I just need to be more patient.

However it was a good year in the reading department. Accelerando by Charles Stross, Spook Country by William Gibson, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (paperbacks 1 2 3 4 5 6) by Peter F. Hamilton to name some of most interesting ones. Of course Cory Doctorow and the usual crowd had some excellent blog posts. Penny Arcade had some truly great comics reminding yet again that “my people” are out there and going strong. 2007 certainly had an abundance of daily slack to consume.

I’m still holding out hope for my tribe. I expect we will continue to kick some ass and make sure things end up OK, preferably with lots of super bad ass scientific stuff.

Here’s to 2008 and the pursuit of slack and knowledge!

They’ve got our future, damn it.

It’s not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills oh no, that’s not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they’ve got it and they’re living in it, damn them. They’ve got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They’ve got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they’re building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul’s Cathedral).

via Charlie’s Diary